katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

The Dead Sea Project (3-1972) in which he placed polyethylene sleeves filled
with sweet water and live fish into an environment that does not permit
life is a project of Diaspora that is converted into an apocalyptic vision of redemption
that is described by the Prophet Ezekiel in Chapter 47. 8
It is possible to see this project as grieving over immigration. The vision of
redemption is toppled to a vision of exile. The killing of the fish in a salty environment
of ‘the salt of the earth’ [Compare, many years later: Yosi Sukri,
“Grandmother Emilia and the Salt of the Earth: A Confession”, and the work
of Eli Patel: “The Silence of the Fish”.]
In this project, I permit myself to see an expression of killing archivization.
The living memory that is absorbed in an annihilating environment in a caustic
territory – immigration that does not confer the right of existence for
accumulation.
other structural expressions of the issues of immigration in the work of Cohen
Gan were manifested in journeys to the areas of the Indian ocean and
Alaska, trips and projects for the purpose of raising the saltiness of the oceans’
water by a fraction of a percent, a fraction that cannot be measured at all.
Finding a material location in which to settle in a sort of netherworld reality
from which one regards the upper reality characterizes all of his works, from
the exhibition housed in a cowshed and to his taking up residence in a tent
within the refugee camp in jericho (1974) as a statement that you comprehend
things only when you live inside them and command the viewpoint of
nether reality concerning the upper reality. 9
on the background of Pinhas Cohen Gan’s exploration of various structural
issues of tension and complementary dichotomous gaps that contented with
the East-West issue amid considerable distancing and its connection to broad
structural problems, a direct squaring off appears in his East-West work (bibliographical
theses for the orientalism theses of Edward Said 94 – 1982)
[See also: Tsalmona, p. 113] which directly positions the divided ego, the two
parts of which are composed of the archiving and the archived (an occidental
archeologist and an Egyptian labourer.)
Only in the mid-80s do the voices rise that are the result of the educational
system of art and advanced studies, which the second- or third-generation
children of immigration had penetrated, who had not necessarily passed
through the protective and enabling filter of absorbing the kibbutzim. At times,
they acquired their education as Israelis lacking exceptional orientation in
one direction or another, and in a combination of new networks of power with
voices that deal in protest, processed by and borrowing the continuous contents
of the orient.
Short and Long Memory, the Dynamic of Negator and Negated
The schema of jewry and Israeliness contend with questions of long and short
memory on a vertical axis, vis-à-vis each and every subject, and with questions
of expressing these conflicts within the expanse, on the axis of the
horizontal.
In his famous essay ‘The mystic Writing Pad’, Freud spoke of an example of
human memory, which he borrowed from a writing object that he encountered
– a writing pad constructed of pairs of pages. When you write on one
page, marks are also registered on the page beneath it. Writing on the bottom
page is even preserved when the upper page is erased and other writing
replaces it. This is the amazing imagery of the connection between short-term
memory and long-term memory. For the discussion I propose here, I shall
detach this schema from the world of the subject and illustrate it concerning
a problem of collective remembrance. We are completely unable to explain
to ourselves to which extent we are impossible without the profound stratum
that lies below, even it is half erased. It is a necessity that this layer exists.
This text of Freud’s, which has been debated often in psychoanalytical and
philosophical literature, provides a good base point even for a debate of erasure
and memory in language and collective awareness.
The experience of the members of the oriental community, within the context
of the first, second, third generation in the sense of the relations of me-
mory and forgetting, or the interactions of writing and erasure, is connected
to the feeling of the first generation, which arrived with a language that it was
forced to erase. This is not similar to the instance of the first generation of pioneers
that arrived with a language and in fact banished it in order to create
a new world. As opposed to them, the oriental actually arrived with its language
and sensed that it is not legitimate. In this instance, it is necessary to
discern between the negator of its past and that denied of its past. The dynamic
of the first generation oriental – its gist is being occupied with disappearing
in public and deriving forbidden pleasure between the walls of its
house or its neighborhood. The dynamic of the second generation in the oriental
experience in Israel is serious work concerning publicity: the son of immigrants
that is occupied consciously or unconsciously with its obsessive
desire to be accepted in the public eye. This is the main thing according to
which the middle generation is tested: synchronizing with the general public,
on the horizontal axis, this is its pain of muteness, silence, rapid assimilation,
and successfulness. In comparison, the phenomenon transpiring today among
the third generation and some children of the second generation in very different
forms is in fact the ascent of the erased-but-yet-accessible tongue, the
home erupting into publicity along a horizontal axis and the breakthrough of
the long-term memory that contends with issue of the connection between
the country and history along a vertical axis.
It is strange, prima facie, that the matter breaks out more forcibly in the third
generation, but this is well-nigh essential: on the one hand, immigration is
not their fundamental experience – but it is the silence of the blank page of
their parents or even their grandparents. However, on the other hand, precisely
since on the surface the children of this generation are marked and
defined by themselves and others as Israelis for all intents and purposes, they
eventually reach the point of tension, breaking, or altering the equilibrium.
This point of tension or breaking erupts among many artists of third-generation
immigration from the orient, and thus its intensity. And moreover, by virtue
of the live event, it also embodies the ability to enlarge upon borders of
esthetics and parameters of the debate of Israeli art in other contexts: it denotes
process of broader significance than mere issue of the orient.
At this stage, a process occurs in Israeli culture that – at visual level – resembles
search for language occurring at the level of music and voice. At the
level of voice, we follow the movement between languages. It happens at the
visual level, as well: beyond applying the mystic writing pad to contexts of
collective consciousness, it is possible to state that in attempting to reconstruct
identity, you must propose a platform – long-term memory. This is what
is happening at present in the artistic process: jewry of the orient or the occident
is for this purpose the deep memory, Israeliness is a form of orientation
in the present, and a type of short-term memory. The oriental attempts
to produce for itself the bottom page, the rug that is yanked from under its
feet, the platform of long-term memory. In essence, this is deconstruction for
the dissecting archive project: taking the identity component that was expropriated
from the Orient, and labeling it whilst so doing, expropriating it from
expropriation, and resuscitating it anew as a more complicated complete symbolic
platform.
Conscious or Unconscious on the Part of the Artist is Irrelevant –
the Duty of the Critic is to be Conscious
Please know this: great art can challenge and attest to fringe society or a state
of distress even if the artist lacks any social awareness or conscience of protest;
it is permissible and necessary to read art as a shout that attests to a
point of origin – even if each factor of conscious protest does not exist in the
awareness of the artist – indeed this is testimony of that who speaks unwittingly
10 , or if you wish, it is a manner of the political unconscious. moreover,
discussing the art of the orient obligates a simultaneous reading of accounts
of such people that neither thought art nor pretended to be artists, but art
shouted out from them against their will.
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